White Nights

(Taylor Hackford, USA, 1985)

I don’t know how I managed to miss White Nights in 1985; it’s only taken me 38 years to catch up with it. I’ve never been a fan of director Taylor Hackford’s work (except for Ray [2004] and the deliriously overwrought The Devil’s Advocate [1997]), and so have lacked motivation to seek it out. At the time of its release, I had no experience, in any medium, of Mikhail Baryshnikov – and I didn’t pick up much in the intervening years apart from his smooth role in the final season of Sex and the City (2003-2004). Now that I realise what the guy could do with his body, colour me stunned.

White Nights is right up my alley. Very evidently a post-Flashdance (1983) High Concept – as were, in a different register, the many breakdance films of the era – it marries a contrived plot mechanism, played and delivered without camp, with a particular type of spectacular exhibitionism. Here, the goal is to show off Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines dancing as often as possible – mostly individually (or with other, largely insignificant partners), and finally together. That running spectacle is, as the saying goes, alone worth the price of admission – and was designed to be.

We’ll get to the plot mechanism in a moment. It sometimes serves to motivate the dancing but, in a sense, absolutely anything (or nothing) motivates this exhibition. The film begins with two stage set-pieces: Baryshnikov (as Kolya Rodchenko) on his world-tour triumph in a restaging of Cocteau’s Le jeune homme et la mort (1946 choreography by Roland Petit [1924-2011]); and Gregory Hines (as Raymond Greenwood) stuck in a small theatre in Siberia (!), singing Porgy and Bess in Russian – but also tap-dancing right off the stage and down the aisle. His female lead in that amateur-looking production (complete with tiny, tinny orchestra) complains, in the wings, about Raymond’s show-off “American” style.

Instantly we have a 1980s trademark, continued well beyond that decade in dance-centred musicals: the proximity of high and low culture, and the prospect of their eventual blending (the Antonio Banderas vehicle and sole Liz Friedlander feature, Take the Lead [2006], is among the more delightful examples). I didn’t know, until reading up afterwards, that this type of blending was (still is) a big part of Baryshnikov’s life-long vision as performer, choreographer and creative manager. In a curious semantic slip not unique to White Nights, the (presumably heterosexual) romantic togetherness evoked on the soundtrack (see below) tends to celebrate this meeting of cultures – and of the dazzling, dancing men.

After the exposition, dancing is liable to break out at any moment (and why not?): Rodney taps as he bears soliloquy-witness to the years of racism he suffered at the hands of White America; Kolya looks wistfully out into the empty auditorium of the Kirov (today the Marinsky) Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and spontaneously decides to give his body a work-out for old times’ sake. As the plot enters the slack latter reaches of Act II, it’s mainly the exercise bar that prompts the moves, whether tentative or fully formed. Baryshnikov’s leg exercises are enough of a show already.

The High Concept: Kolya is on a plane (with his manager played by Geraldine Page) which hits a spot of circuitry trouble (the ‘reveal’ shot on this dilemma is priceless), and finds himself temporarily injured and perhaps permanently helpless in Russia – from where he defected, and is therefore still regarded as, technically, a criminal. (This half of the premise echoes Baryshnikov’s flying the coop into Canada in 1974 while on tour there with the Bolshoi Ballet.) Rather wonkily woven into the unfolding of events is the Russian meteorological phenomenon of ‘white nights’ – persistent daylight for 24 hours – which at least obviated the need for any nocturnal shoots!

Once recuperated, Kolya is then (not entirely logically) placed under the amateur surveillance of Rodney – a black American who (this bit isn’t given much backstory) defected to Communist Russia – and his wife, Darya (Isabella Rossellini in an early, charming role). This occurs under the assumption that the Great Dancer can be coerced into dancing again for his Mother Country, and even reunited with his High Culture ex-flame who chose not to defect, Galina (Helen Mirren – who subsequently married Hackford). An aside: this seems to be a motif in hothouse political melodramas: the one who defected and the one who didn’t, brought again face to face; it reappears today in Abbas Amini’s Czech Republic production Endless Borders (2023), set between Iran and Afghanistan.

Some synopses of White Nights underline the supposed “racial tension” – as well as sexual jealousy, and perhaps other kinds of cultural hubris as well – between the male leads. But none of this really exists. Kolya resents being under surveillance, for sure, and he takes a few digs at Raymond for his unwise mirror-defection in the wrong ideological direction; but the rest of the drama is all a big put-on for the hidden cameras and microphones of the Soviet state apparatus. And even that put-on motivates a great dance sequence (the one where the guys finally dance together)!

The swing into Act III actually brings some hitherto-absent narrative excitement: can Kolya and Darya make it, just a few blocks away, to the American Embassy? Can they trust their mysterious USA contact to appear at the end of a bridge? Is Galina a looming double-agent in this scheme, or will she prove faithful to the Soviet system? The thrills continue, literally, all the way to the Embassy gate – and continue to be shadowed by the likely fate of Raymond, who was forced to play decoy and is now in the hands of the Bad Guys.

Actually, the burden of Soviet Badness in White Nights is unfussily freighted onto a single character: KGB Colonel Chaiko, played by … Jerzy Skolimowski! He’s so sadistic, so awful, that even his staff take every opportunity, in the final stages, to subvert his command and help the re-defectors. Skolimowski is great fun to watch (he’s acted in half-a-dozen other films not his own); but it hardly needs spelling out, in this context, that the film is an ode to America (which, in the story, goes completely unseen) and its values – notwithstanding all that racism which Raymond taps out so vividly on his loungeroom floor. “The country has changed, you’ll see!”, Kolya argues with him. Hmmm … As for Communism, its global connotations hold firm in this pre-Perestroika, pre-Fall of the Wall phase of the Western Imaginary: catch the warm greeting from Chaiko for that Latin American “comrade” traded in the denouement!

So, the Balance Sheet: Baryshnikov, Hines, Skolimowski, Rossellini, Mirren, USA versus Soviet melodramatics, meteorology … not to mention syrupy ballads by Phil Collins and Lionel Ritchie (the hit “Say You, Say Me”) on the soundtrack! Where was I in 1985?!?

© Adrian Martin 20 January 2023